Obama's shotgun approach to the economy

Letter to the editor

Donald A. MoskowitzLondonderry, NH

Posted 4/8/09

Editor,

The Obama Administration is throwing many hundreds of billions of dollars at a multitude of programs, hoping for economic success. It appears the thrust of the policies encompass Rahm Emanuel’s philosophy of “not letting a crisis go to waste”.

Instead of concentrating on creating jobs to spark the economy, President Obama’s proposed budget is diluting our limited resources. It includes a prospective national health care system ($634 billion), promoting alternative energy sources, and making college more available to low income students. Alternative energy is important and it will create jobs, and other programs might be worthwhile over the long term in a burgeoning economy, but they pose a drain on us in the current recession. The $3.6 trillion budget will provide a deficit of $1.75 trillion in FY 2010 and annual deficits of $1 trillion for many years to come.

There are somewhere around 8,000 pork barrel earmarks in the proposed budget worth an estimated $8 billion. They include $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York, $1.7 million for a honeybee factory in Texas, amongst others. These earmarks should be axed. It looks like and smells like the same pork barrel politics of prior administrations, except the weight of the thundering elephants has been replaced with the misguided socialistic wanderings of the donkeys.

President Obama plans on paying for half the health care costs from increased taxes on families earning more than $250,000 per year, and these families will see a significant decrease in allowable itemized tax deductions for charitable contributions and mortgage interest. These actions will depress charitable contributions during a time of great need and will hurt the housing market. The programs are a means of redistributing money from more successful families to the less successful, which runs counter to our free enterprise system. They should not be implemented.

The Administration has to cease exploiting our economic fears, including the media campaign to the American people, which is designed to enable it to implement very expensive domestic social programs. Long term social programs should be debated after the turnaround of our economy.